Open Letter to Ronald W. Reagan on the Occasion of Good News

by Shelton Hull

Dear Mr. Reagan:

I’ve known for some time that you were suffering from the

ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease and that you are now past the point of ever

appearing in public again. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s when I was

11,

so I know firsthand–well, secondhand–how horrible and tragic it is,

especially when it strikes a man like you, whose voluminous intellect was

once the envy of trailer parks across the world that you, and you alone,

made safe from communism. My earliest memory of politics is being six

years

old in 1984, riding down the street in my mother’s green Pontiac LeMans,

my

precocious head out the window yelling “Vote for Reagan!” Sixteen years later,

you probably lack the mental fitness to cast an informed ballot, which

makes

you, as always, the quintessential conservative.

Yes, well Mr. Reagan, I was just writing to let you know what an evil

piece

of shit you are and how greatly I anticipate the moment when you finally

exit my fucking planet, stage far-right. It brings such great joy to my

heart to think of you, once the most powerful man in the world, now lying

in

your own feces, drooling, staring blankly ahead at something only you can

see, unable to feed or clean yourself, ranting incoherently while your

family stands around crying, trying to remember what you used to be. Ooh,

my

soul feels so warm right now… You, whose first job in politics was as a

rat-bastard snitch, selling out your fellow bad actors, tossing them onto

the anti-communist bonfires of the ’50s with not a moment’s indecision.

You

knew when the studio made you play straight-man to a monkey that you

needed

a new profession, a new way to pay your alimony to that chick from Falcon

Crest. And so you became a professional liar, and finally found your place

in this world.

Mr. Reagan, I hope the first few years of your eternity are spent being

gang-raped by all the homosexuals who died of AIDS because you felt their

plight unworthy of public funds and private concern back when the problem

could still be fixed. The CDC could’ve isolated the first cases way back

in

the early ’80s, set up quarantines, aggressive testing and so forth, and

maybe limited the spread of AIDS to just a few hundred or just a few

thousand people. But faggots, niggers and junkies don’t vote Republican,

so

what the fuck did you care? I bet you liked the idea of thinning the herd

a

little bit, huh? After all, you were governor of California when the free

love movement and its adjacent activist concerns first popped up in the

’60s. Longhairs, hippies, dope fiends, feminazi bitches and whores in long

flowing skirts– you fought them tooth and nail like a good little

demagogue.

You hated them then, and you hate them now… actually, you probably hate

that catheter jammed up your urethra a little more these days. Your

so-called Moral Majority was a dying institution before it was even

formed,

using the good name of Jesus Christ to advance a set of core beliefs that

even Pontius Pilate would’ve distanced himself from. Telling people that

their bodies are foul and should not be shown to others, that sex outside

of

heterosexual marriage in the course of procreation is an affront to

God… AIDS gave those people, most of whom were greedy, wifebeating,

adulterous pedophiles, an excuse to talk shit about things they had no

conception of. “Why waste money saving lives? We’ve got Central American

peasants to slaughter!” And now it’s too late, the disease has spread

worldwide, the people of Africa, who survived your support of regimes that

tortured their men, raped their women, starved their children and killed

everyone they could, stand a fine chance of total extinction within this

century. But you won’t live to see it…

Mr. Reagan, do you even remember what your body looked like before the

tubes and the bedsores, before the aggressive physical and mental atrophy

that started before you even got your party’s nomination? You must have

seen

this coming when you found yourself dozing off at Cabinet meetings– not

that

your attention was needed or anything. Your soul has been gone for a long

long

time; your body is just trying to catch up. You, Reagan, the iron man who

brought down the Iron Curtain, who could not be killed by bullets or

cancer,

will someday be killed by karma, because bullets and cancer are much too

fast and way too easy for God’s holy satisfaction. Ronnie, Jehovah wants

you

to die real slow, to pull your mind and soul up to Heaven and make you

look

down on yourself, see yourself as the rational world sees you, because

only

then will you realize that you always were, and will forever be, dead

fucking wrong. Have a nice day.